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About this blog

I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.
I'm a world-famous podcaster and screencaster (albeit VERY thinly spread). :-)

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I hope you like my new blog banner - in honour of the new zEnterprise EC12. We actually announced the zEC12 (for short) the day I returned from vacation. Great planning, IBM! It's taken me a while to catch up - and changing the banner was an important step. I've known about the soon-to-be-announced processor range for quite some time, as I think you'd expect. And tracked what was going to be... [More]

Prompted by Troy Coleman's article zEC12 and zIIP Processors I thought I'd write about how I see the future for zAAPs. First, his article does a good job of covering the area. So I recommend you read it. Troy mentions the "zAAP on zIIP" function - which allows zAAP-eligible work to run on a zIIP. It's not news and it's a good piece of function: It means you can fill zIIPs more readily, making them... [More]

I don't know how many of you will've spotted this but there was a nice instrumentation enhancement in the recent System zEC12 announcement. It comes with the RMF support for CFLEVEL 18 ( OA37826 and provides much more detail on paths to Coupling Facilities (CFs). Previously RMF reported channel path acronyms - one per path. And that was all. (A channel path acronym is something like... [More]

Round about now you'd be expecting posts to be geared towards the recent zEC12 announcement, or perhaps CICS TS 5.1 or the DB2 11 Preview, or IDAA V3.
So what this post is about will probably have slipped by unnoticed.
After all you don't spend all your time looking for obscure New Function APARs, do you? But I think some of you will find this one of value, or at least quite interesting. (I... [More]

When I first heard of Flash Express as part of the zEC12 announcement -
some time before announcement - I thought of one use case above all,
and one of particularly poignant resonance with some of my readers: Dump capture amelioration. Then, in the marketing materials, I heard of others.
And the discussions have grown more numerous recently.
So it’s time I expressed (pardon the pun) my... [More]

9 months on from
this post and I finally get some time to enhance my Coupling Facility reporting. If you recall I mentioned
OA37826 , which provides new SMF 74 Subtype 4 data and fields in the RMF Coupling Facility Activity report - in support of enhancements in CFLEVEL 18. [1] I also mentioned that my 74–4 code needed reworking to properly support the Remote Coupling Facility Section... [More]